Not detected. The online scanner did not identify the website which contained material that had been plagiarised.

Basic plagiarism – copied and pasted from an electronic book

Detected. The online scanner correctly identified the electronic book which contained material that had been plagiarised.

General observationsEase of use, overall experience. If other features were included (e.g. spelling, grammar check), how easy were they to use and how useful were they?

Smallseotool.com provides a range of free online resources for webmasters, internet marketing consultants and search engine optimization specialists. It offers a free plagiarism-scanner as one of its free resources.The design and layout of the page is simple enough and an unlimited amount of text can be copied and pasted directly into the website's browser to scan for plagiarism. The number of scans is also unlimited, however, a "file upload' facility is not offered. Online support is offered and users are able to contact the website with general queries.When tested, the scanner runs text pasted into the website through various search engines to find plagiarised work and highlights each sentence in red or green to denote either plagiarised work or original content. Watching the process is quite interesting as each result pops up one below the other. It's not as quick as some of the other online scanners, analysing 815 words in just under a minute in one example.Unfortunately, the tool was not entirely accurate. It performed best when scanning large passages of plagiarised text which had been unchanged and, to its credit, it also correctly identified the source of the website where some words have been changed – not all plagiarism scanners manage this. However, in one test, the scanner was only able to detect one plagiarised sentence in a submission which contained six plagiarised sentences in total – this would be enough in itself to prove plagiarism had occurred, however, it also demonstrates that the scanner is not as accurate as it could be.Unlike other plagiarism scanners, Smallseotool.com's provides an "originality rating' and, although on the face of it, this appears like a useful tool, in reality it is quite misleading. Six plagiarised documents were run through its scanner and it reported that 48% of it was "unique content" – accordingly, it was 48% out because 0% of the documents submitted contained unique content.